Shanghai Cooperation Organization takes another giant step

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held its 24^th summit of heads of state on July 4 in Astana, Kazakhstan. Major Western media excoriated the event when they didn’t ignore it all together but it proved to be one for the record books.

It brought together in a single room the leadership of countries representing 80% of the Eurasian landmass, 40% of the global population and nearly 30% of global GDP. The fruit of more than two decades of inter-Eurasian diplomacy, the SCO has ten full members (Belarus joined on July 4) and 14 “dialogue partners” from Asia and the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

The summit participants approved 25 strategic documents covering energy, security, trade, environment and finance.

The message, of course, is that Eurasian integration continues to press ahead with unmitigated gusto despite (or more likely because of) bloody conflicts, barefaced meddling by outside powers in the internal affairs of Asian nations and the increasing unreliability – repeatedly articulated – of the US dollar as a “non-partisan” means of exchange and store of value.

Eurasian security concept

The real story of the SCO Summit, for anyone paying close attention (I was there), is that Eurasian countries are moving to establish an indivisible, Eurasia-centric collective security framework that would work alongside post-WWII international security architecture, despite the latter’s shortcomings and contradictions.

Missing this deeper point, many in the Western press corps characterized the summit either as a forum for business development, an exercise in fruitless optics or an effort to acquire prestige on the part of states languishing in the gulag of non-Western, misfit nations.

As stated in the Astana